War of Alien Aggression 4 Taipan (18 page)

 He read it out loud in a deliberately expressionless tone. "'
Return to position, Harry. This is your last, bloody chance
.'" His voice went up a fifth. "Last chance before what?"

"Never you mind that, Mr. Bergano," Cozen said. "Put on your helmet."

Ram leaned into the comms. "All decks, prepare to vent atmo for battle."

"Getting green lights all across the board," Bergano said. "Ready to vent on your mark."

"Now hear this. Now hear this.
Hardway
is venting for combat in sixty seconds. All hands, all decks in full suits and helmets. Action stations. Damage control teams make ready. We're going in."

*****

The emissions from
Taipan
's main antenna made Dana tingle with pins and needles under her skin. The junction box had been placed twenty meters up off the hull, just inside the outer edges of the artificial gravity. If it had been placed just a few meters further out, then the antenna and the junction box would have been in zero-gee. It should have been. In the plan it had been, but the ship's gravity extended farther out than anyone had thought it would. 

There was enough gravity up there at the edge of the field that Dana had to hang off the antenna and try not to fall while she attempted to patch into
Taipan's
comms system directly. She thought she'd be able to have two hands to do this, but now, she only had one and it was slowing her down.  

Dana perched on thin branches and wrapped an arm around the trunk while her free hand extended the hard-wire from her suit. She patched it into the antenna's diagnostic port. The ship locked her out, of course. It denied her access without proper credentials, but Ram had given her a daemon - software to introduce her to
Taipan
as Captain Augustus Horan. Once it knew her, it would be happy to pipe her signals out the antenna to Matilda Witt's network of command and control relays. 

Ram's daemon compiled its payload for injection and flashed the word '
READY
' in her visor, but the instant Dana mimed tapping the projected button marked,
'EXECUTE'
, smoke puffed out the connection between her hard-line and the antenna. The wire connecting them burst into brief and brilliant flame. Before it melted, it carried a shock from the antenna's junction box into Dana's exosuit. 

All her muscles convulsed at once so that she hugged the antenna's trunk. She ground her teeth on the charge running through her. The lights went out in her helmet. When Dana's muscles finally failed,
Taipan's
gravity pulled her down to the hull, twenty meters below. 

Her arms and legs caught in the boughs and branches of the smaller antennas. She landed on her back with all her limbs out to absorb the shock. The fact that it tingled and hurt everywhere right away meant she wasn't dead or paralyzed.

The dead Squidy looked down at her and in the reflection off its cycloptic visor she saw the sparks coming from the melted module on her chest. The heater, the AC, and the rebreather still worked, but the suit's computer was fried. There was no doing this from the outside of the ship – not anymore.

Dana was the only one that could take away Matilda Witt's command and control network and she wasn't about to quit just because the price of victory had gone up.

She left the dead Squidy where he'd be found, climbed out of the antenna forest, and scrambled up the steep slope of
Taipan's
hull. Thirty meters starboard from the base of a vertical face she couldn't climb she found a service airlock she hoped led into the upper decks. It was set almost two meters back into the added armor, but the airlock's input panel remained accessible.  

They'd never talked about her actually going inside
Taipan
, but from what she knew, any airlock on any Staas Company ship would open for a Staas Company Officer with valid executive command codes. She couldn't remember Augustus Horan's codes. She tried, but after being electrocuted, she could barely remember her own command codes. Dana's heart pounded and her hands trembled with too much adrenaline. She shivered in her suit. 

Dana pulled the matchbox computer from her pocket and set it against the input panel where it could interface. The handshake only took milliseconds. After that,
Taipan's
airlock met Ram's second software daemon. It welcomed Captain Augustus Horan and opened the doors for him. It probably notified the bridge of his arrival, too. That was going to be problematic. Dana tried not to think it through too much or dwell on what a lousy idea this was. She genuinely believed she could make it to a terminal and complete her mission. After that, what would happen was anyone's guess. 

A beep in her ear prompted her to enter. The open airlock looked hungry. Lt. Commander Dana Sellis retrieved the matchbox computer from the input panel, drew her sidearm, and stepped inside.

Chapter Fifteen

Jordo winced as small-bore particle streams stabbed and slashed at the Privateer fighters from scores of fast-tracking batteries on all six of the Squidy gunboats. They crisscrossed and hatched the space above the alien hulls. The flashing reactors from all the Bitzers they smashed and skewered lit the scene like a thunderstorm. It was bloodier than Jordo had imagined.

Dana Sellis was supposed to sabotage Matilda Witt's command and control. She was supposed to take out the CCRN so the orders from
Taipan
couldn't reach the fighters, but the stream of suicidal orders coming to them from Matilda Witt continued unbroken.

Alien fire ripped past Jordo's cockpit, reaching for Paladin and missing. Jordo and the Lancers flew in behind the Hellcats, following the squadron-specific attack and targeting vectors in their helmets given by Matilda Witt and her tacticians on
Taipan
. Two minutes into the battle, Jordo was sure 90% of them would be killed.

Out the corner of his eye to port and starboard, above and below, fighters from the 55th and 99th twisted off their line of travel as the Squidies' particle streams ran them through. They turned and pitched with the enemy streams before their breached reactors cooked off.

Dirty jinked around Jordo's 151 and rolled over him, "How much longer?" She knew Jordo had no idea when Dana would kill the relay net.

New orders from
Taipan
came in. The target vectoring arrow projected in Jordo's flight helmet twisted and shot to starboard. He and the rest of his squadron followed it, veering away from that wounded cruiser with the Hellcats and flying to the
next
target on the
next
Squidy ship selected by Matilda Witt and her tacticians. Ahead of them, the 23rd dusted one of the big guns. The last of the 112th took another one of the fast defensive batteries off the broad, cliff-face wall of a 400-meter tooth-shaped hull.

They flew from ship to ship together in a cloud, diving into the alien guns to blow them off and then moving on to the next target. And it was working. Jordo couldn't deny that. The Lancers and the Hellcats were starting their second lap around the six escort ships and Jordo could see plenty of damage on the cruisers' hulls. On the one coming up fast below, a third of the guns were already gone or damaged beyond use.

Debris from a hundred, blasted and melted F-151s tumbled and spun through the battle. Jordo didn't know how many pilots would be left when it was over. Already, they'd lost ten percent; already, they'd been decimated.

The 133rd Lancers bore down on the next cruiser as its guns plucked the 99th from the sky. But the battle was about to get bloodier. Bay doors opened near midships on the alien hull; the enemy had kept fighters in reserve.

A dozen red bandits blasted out of their bay. The alien aces and their spiked hulls came up at the 99
th
and ripped through the middle of the attacking squadron while spun sideways, delivering enfilade fire, and shooting down the longest axis of the Bitzers' formation. They killed five pilots on that first pass. Two of the planes they hit continued down into the hull without pulling up and impacted below. One cooked off almost up against the cruiser, but it only marred the armor.

Jordo couldn't wait any longer for Dana to disrupt Matilda Witt's command and control. They'd all be dead soon unless they changed tactics
right now
. He said, "Lancers, on me." Then, he turned and spun on his jets to engage the bandits.

"About goddamn time," Paladin said.

The Hellcats stayed in their dive.

"Lancer 1-1 to Hellcat 1-1, We can take those bandits, but we can't do it alone." Pooch stayed silent. "Hellcat 1-1, do you copy?" There was no answer, and Jordo took his feet off the pedals and kicked and kicked at the front of his cockpit.

The red bandits took six more as their formation tore past the Weasels and headed for the Hellcats. Pooch was waiting too long. When the Hellcats dove in on that cruiser they'd get the same bloody thing the Weasels got.

Gusher said, "Jordo, you count those bandits down there?" The dozen were getting closer fast.

"There's enough for everyone."

"We got
more
bandits!" Paladin shouted, "Launching from the other cruisers." The Squidy ships had all held back a pocket squadron and now, they poured out looking for vengeance. A total of seventy-two, angry, alien aces tore into
Taipan
's fighters along with the Squidies' gun batteries. The only way it could get worse, Jordo thought, was if the unexplained, spherical ship at the center of the Squidies' formation now opened fire on them as well.

Jordo screamed for Witt's squadrons to break off the assault and engage the enemy fighters, but Witt's pilots all followed the arrows in their helmets. They dove and fired on the guns Matilda Witt ordered them to, and the vastly outnumbered alien aces had themselves a turkey shoot.

The Lancers accelerated as hard as they could to intercept the red bandits before the aliens could run their rapier beams through the Hellcats. "Lancers, split 'em up and smack 'em down in Fluid 5. Lancer 1-5, you are the wild-card. You watch our backs, 1-5."

"Tally ho, baby," she purred. "Dirty is your angel."

*****

Dana Sellis stared back at the camera inside the airlock. She knew Matilda Witt saw her. She kept the gun out of sight.

Two Staas Guards got to the airlock door before it cycled and eyeballed her through the viewport. They were out of breath. In the final seconds of the cycle, as the lock came to pressure, two more of them exited a lift down the passageway and moved towards the lock.

The viewports were set at head level. Dana stood right up against the airlock doors so the Staas Guards on the other side would have a hard time seeing what she was doing with her hands. Their grim faces stared without question or sympathy. No point in explaining anything to them. They didn't care why she was there.

By the time the five-second warning sounded, four of them stood on the other side. They were all men. When she remembered that she was attractive, she smiled at them. Watch my pretty eyes, she thought. Below the viewport she charged the capacitors and flipped the safety off.

Taipan's
airlock doors opened fast. The very instant they did, Dana fired a spread of flechettes across the four guards. The darts zipped out from the muzzle silently without any flash. A little hum from the discharging capacitors was all they heard as the darts burrowed in.

Inside, a centimeter under the skin, the darts dissolved almost instantly, but the Staas Guards didn't drop as fast from the narcotic as Doc Ibora said they would. One even clenched the trigger of his hand-cannon as he fell. His fat, .62 cal riot control slug went into the deck and pancaked, shaking the metal plate under the carpet.

The map in her helmet said forward, ten meters, then right. That's the way to the nearest terminal with access to
Taipan
's mainframe. Three steps later, the lift doors at the end of the passage opened, and Dana put two more Staas Guards to sleep.

She walked with the little gun out in front of her now, checking at the intersection before turning right. She couldn't hear anything with the helmet on. The lieutenant that came out a hatch around the corner startled her. Dana panic-yanked the trigger and it pulled the muzzle of the flechette gun up as she discharged it. This, time the rapid-fire darts raked up the woman's neck and cheek. The way her eyes brimmed with terror as she dropped, she must have thought Dana killed her. The holes were tiny. Dana told herself once more how they wouldn't even leave scars. It didn't make her feel any better.

In compartment 25b, in the center of the deck, Dana found a hard-wired terminal to access
Taipan
's mainframe and the comms systems. With her left hand she took her matchbox computer out and set it against the terminal. During the little chime it made to let her know the handshake with the mainframe was complete, she heard the first shouts and footfalls from the passageway.

Hands tried the locked hatch behind her.

Taipan's
mainframe computer denied her access to communications. It rejected Augustus Horan's stolen codes, the ones Ram had given her – the ones they'd planned to use, the ones that got her in the door. Matilda Witt must have blocked them already. Dana tried her own command codes and they'd been blocked too.

The matchbox and the daemon had Ram's codes in it as well. Witt still trusted Ram, so she tried
his
executive command codes, and in less than a second, she had the access she needed to the ship's communications system. That might take some explaining later, but Ram would think of something.

Now that it had access, the software daemon Ram wrote was already projecting a large green button in her visor marked, '
SEND'
. Pushing the phantom button with her index finger was all it took to send the custom-crafted data packets from the matchbox computer to the terminal and out through the main antenna to the microsat proxies of Matilda Witt's command and control relay network. It wasn't the way they'd planned to do it, but it should work.